Mobile wireless communication devices, such as a cellular telephone or a wireless personal digital assistant, can provide a wide variety of communication services including, for example, voice communication, text messaging, internet browsing, and electronic mail. Mobile wireless communication devices can operate in a wireless communication network of overlapping “cells”, each cell providing a geographic area of wireless signal coverage that extends outward from a base transceiver station (BTS). Whether idle or actively connected, a mobile wireless communication device can be associated with a “serving” cell in a wireless communication network and be aware of neighboring cells to which the mobile wireless communication device can also associate. The quality of a communication link between the mobile wireless communication device and the BTS can vary based on the distance between them and on interference included in signals received at either end of the communication link. BTS in nearby neighbor cells can transmit in a range of radio frequency spectrum that overlaps with the transmit spectrum of the BTS in the serving cell, and mobile wireless communication devices in the serving cell can receive transmissions from a BTS in a neighbor cell as interference.
To avoid interference on a particular carrier frequency, a mobile wireless communication device can frequency hop among several different frequencies across a range of radio frequency spectrum. Transmissions from several different neighbor cell BTS can combine as a set of multiple interferers received at the mobile wireless communication device. As each BTS can transmit on multiple carrier frequencies, the combined interference from the several neighbor cell BTS can affect many if not all of the frequency hopping carrier frequencies received by the wireless communication device in the serving cell. In order to emulate a multiple interferer transmission for mobile wireless communication devices in a laboratory environment, typically a separate unit of test equipment, such as a signal generator, can be used to simulate transmissions for each BTS in a neighbor cell. Such a test configuration can be bulky and costly. Thus there exists a need for a method to emulate wireless interference from multiple BTS using minimal equipment.